Why not give Linux as a Christmas gift? MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com) suggests you do: “Are you looking for a neat and very useful computer related gift for someone on your Christmas or Holiday gift list — or a gift for any occasion for that matter? Consider making that gift Linux. If you think about it, Linux is a great gift idea. Linux has come a long way over the past few years. Some Linux packages (distributions) now are fairly easy to install and to use. There is lots of software for Linux and it´s likely that you can do everything you want to do computer-wise with Linux. All in all, Linux now is a decent alternative . . . to Microsoft (MS) Windows. A gift of the Linux operating system (OS) could just be the best gift of all — computer-wise. With all the free software that comes with many Linux distributions, plus all the additional free software and free upgrades that are so easily downloadable, Linux is the gift that keeps on giving, and giving, and giving.” Check out this MozillaQuest.com story for details.

InformationWeek.com has a feature on Michael Robertson, who’s promising to deliver an operating system that can run both Windows and Linux applications. “Lindows.com is preparing to launch early next year
an operating system that can run both Linux and
Windows applications on a PC, or run as a second
operating system on a Windows machine …

Once Lindows’ installed base is large enough, Robertson’s plan is to have
Lindows aggregate Linux applications from sites all over the Web and serve
as a virtual clearinghouse for them-much as MP3.com does for music that’s
available in MP3 format.”

Interesting-people.org has the post detailing Cem Kaner’s attendance of the 17th meeting of the Uniform Computer
>Information Transactions Act drafting committee. Kaner notes: “The drafting committee is under intense pressure to work a political
compromise, because, after passing in Virginia and Maryland, UCITA has
been rejected in every state that has considered it and three states have passed ‘bomb shelter’ laws designed to keep UCITA-governed contract rules out of their states.”

Dot,KDE.org has the info. Many FreeBSD and Sun Solaris users can now
get a precompiled KDE 2.2.2 from the normal locations. The
FreeBSD packages are supposed to work only with 4.4 Stable on Intel
and compatible platforms.

LinuxJournali.com has the how-to article: ”

In Part 1 of this series, we learned how to set up transparent usage of a VNC desktop both remotely across a network and on a console, via a display manager, in such a way that
the same desktop (and its desktop state) is available from both types of locations. In Part 2 we talk about making this ubiquitous access more secure. We’ll be using OpenSSH from
www.openssh.org, but other implementations of SSH may work as well.

Our goal is to access our VNC desktop in a secure manner from any location.”

Dot.KDE.org has links to information about Livne, KDE’s Hebrew localization
coordinator and the maintainer of the KDE Israel Web site. He says: “You can expect to find KDE 3.0 (hopefully) fully translated into Hebrew. This is in addition to
KDE’s new advanced internationalization features, which finally enable users to easily work with
right-to-left languages, all thanks to Qt 3.0.”

C’est la vie writes: “Description: A denial of service vulnerability was reported in the Mozilla browser. A remote user can create Javascript that will cause the browser to consume nearly all CPU resources and then crash. More at SecurityTracker.com.“

The Register: “US Defense Department and FBI officials contacted Microsoft on Friday to express
their concern over the recently-disclosed security bugs affecting all versions of
Windows, the Associated Press reports.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Letter to Santa from a Security Administrator,” “Application Gateways
and Stateful Inspection: Comparing and Contrasting,” and “Social Engineering Fundamentals, Part I: Hacker Tactics.” If you are
interested in crypto/stegano you may also want to read “Steganography, Next Generation,” and “Paving the way for
‘uncrackable’ codes.”